A Medical School Educational Intervention to Prevent and Reduce Blaming and Minimizing Trauma Patients

Abstract

As medical providers care for trauma survivors, some reactions can exacerbate their patient's suffering, yet many providers feel unprepared to respond in more helpful ways. The aim of this study was to develop and test an educational intervention to reduce unhelpful attitudes such as victim blaming. Fifty-one medical students were randomly assigned to either view an intervention video regarding potentially inappropriate reactions or an intervention control video consisting of general trauma information. Participants who viewed the intervention video were statistically significantly less likely to blame a trauma-vignette victim than the control participants with a medium effect size (d = 0.66), but this did not seem to generalize to other relevant attitudes. Limitations including small sample size and trauma and population specific rather than inclusive measures. Future research might expand to include behavioral measures and target additional areas for improvement in the medical care of trauma survivors.